Has it ever occurred to you that the world is not black and white? Just because an entity does SOME bad things doesn't mean that EVERYTHING it does is bad. You'd think that people from the USA of all places would understand that.
Looking at it that way, the "smart" clock, being aware of the date, will only save me effort if my power goes out (or the microwave is unplugged, etc) less than twice per year. Doesn't seem very realistic to me.
Less than two power outages per year is unrealistic? Where do you live? o.o I've only had one power outage in my life ever since I moved out of my parents' place more than ten years ago...
(My microwave, BTW, is a sturdy old model that doesn't have fancy things like digital timers, a clock and so on. All it does is heat food, and it's been doing that without any failures for more than 20 years. You just don't get that kind of solid engineering anymore today.;))
IANAL, but trade dress != trademark. They're related concepts that are quite similar, but they're not the same. (Just a technicality, I know, but still.)
You may have been joking, but that idea sure makes sense, although you'd have to take into account that the military in general is the symptom, not the underlying cause, so you have to treat the cause first - otherwise, the symptoms will just reappear...
Cameras recording private and public spaces are NOT completely different, and the notion that just because someone is in (or acting in) public he has no right to privacy is fallacious as well.
Consider this extreme example: upon leaving your house in the morning, you're greeted by your personal police officer, who will follow you around all day, watch you, film everything you do and record everything you say and write down all the people you interact with and so on. He won't enter any private premises you enter, but he will wait outside until you come back out, and he will always be around when you're in public. And this happens not just once, it happens each day, every day, for the rest of your life; and you neither know what the data is being used for, how long it'll be stored etc., nor do you have a right to access it.
Would you like that?
Probably not. But using your above argument, I could say that it's only your public behaviour - in public - that is being recorded. Why would you be against that? The answer, of course, is that the implied statement that whenever you're in public you have no right to privacy anymore is, simply put, false.
As long as they only use data from court documents etc. that are publicly available, anyway, I honestly don't see the problem. It's not as if they're making available secret data, after all...
34 out of 332? That's an *abysmal* response rate and pretty much means that the study is entirely worthless, no matter what the conclusions are or who actually answered.
Aron Pálmi Ágústsson is also still in prison, although he will be released in August - at the age of 23, after having spent ten years in a Texan prison for playing doctor with another kid when he was 13. And then they call it a "justice" system...
The proper solution to the "12 year-old and 13 year-old experiment with each other" problem, I think, is to recognise that children (and at 12 or 13 years, they ARE children - old children, but still children!) cannot be held responsible for laws they break the same way that adults do, simply because they lack the ability to understand them properly and reflect on their actions and whether these actions are right or wrong. I'm not even saying that a 12 year-old and a 13 year-old exploring their sexuality together are even doing something wrong, but others would probably disagree, and recognising that as children, they're incapable of committing crimes (mens rea is not given, even when actus reus is), would ensure that they can't be held responsible no matter what some bible-thumping fundamentalist thinks.
As for the rest... why is the age of consent set in stone at 18, anyway? The actual age of consent varies between 13 and 18 in the "western" world (Spain has 13, for example; Iceland, as well as a bunch of other European nations, has 14, and so on), and even in the USA, the actual age of consent seems to vary from 16 to 18 depending on state. Many countries also have special rules for partners with a small age-gap, and/or rules for partners in a relationship based on trust or dependency where coercion is a concern (e.g. teacher/student).
And of course, it's also worth keeping in mind that we're talking about the age below which content can never be given *at all*. Sexual molestation or abuse or rape of someone above the age of consent is still just that, and nobody wants to change that; the only question that should matter when the age of consent is debated is whether it is AT ALL possible for ANYONE to engage in sexual acts consensually, without it AUTOMATICALLY being molestation, abuse or rape.
Personally, I think 14 is a good choice for the age of consent, especially since it fits my definition of who should legally be considered a child (see the first paragraph), too.
(And just for the record, I'm not interested in young people, myself - I actually prefer my partners to be at least 10 or 20 years older than I am.)
Or they'll just move to a different town that doesn't have similar restrictions. This is a classic example of CYA (cover your arse) security; it doesn't make a iota of a difference with regard to any future crimes that may be committed, but when something *does* happen, it allows the politicians involved to say "it's not our fault - we did something about it!". In fact, if it happens in another town, they can even pat themselves on the back and point to the fact that it didn't happen in theirs as evidence for how well their laws and regulations are working.
So, yeah - it's all about covering your own arse and being able to come across as a hardliner so you'll get more votes from the "won't somebody please think of the children" hardliner moos and BNPs. What it is NOT about - and what it actually does not achieve - is actually reducing crime or making anyone genuinely safer.
The coral cache link isn't working for me at least, but mirrordot seems to have caught it. Just be sure to chop off the first 3635 bytes of HTML prepended to the file.
if this punk gets in front of a jury and spouts off the way he has been on his blog, his case is sunk regardless of whether the written law is on his side.
Outside of the fact that this is an entirely (a priori) baseless statement, why would he even appear "in front of a jury"? Look at this way: suppose a Romanian company sues you for something you post about in your blog. Would you travel to Romania then to appear in front of a Romanian court? Of course not, so why should he do the same thing when he's sued in the USA?
Copyright law isn't the same all over the world. Sure, this kind of argument probably wouldn't float in the USA, but can you really say whether there's any merit to it in India?
Indeed - both Yahoo and hotmail are artificially inflating their numbers. Yahoo requires you to have an account if you want to use just about anything on Yahoo (like Yahoo Groups, for example), and while a hotmail account isn't strictly required to use msn (the IM service), 99% of the people I know use one, anyway - M$ just tries you to steer away from signing up with a third-party email address in any way it can (or at least it did when *I* signed up).
So, yeah, it's quantity vs. quality. Maybe GMail *still* is a distant third, but I think the numbers for the other two services are overinflated and useless.
And...? I'm not actually sure what the point of this story is. Teens do stupid things? Wow, news at 11! As long as it was just a *comparatively* minor bill of 1100 USD and as long as there were no consequences besides the financial ones, it's no big deal - at least not for anyone other than the girl's parents.
Of course, he's actually putting the cart before the horse - there is no such thing as "intellectual property", and therefore, there is no discrepancy in the treatment of "intellectual property" vs. actual property. The fact that copyrights are not perpetual is precisely WHY they aren't (one form of) "intellectual property", so you cannot argue for perpetual copyright by claiming that they already are.
Funny then how it says "*Congress* shall make no law". If they really intended it to apply to more than what the government (federal or state) does, then why did they write the amendment like that?
Also, the US constitution does not grant a right to free speech; it recognises an EXISTING right to free speech. Big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's the same EU.
Has it ever occurred to you that the world is not black and white? Just because an entity does SOME bad things doesn't mean that EVERYTHING it does is bad. You'd think that people from the USA of all places would understand that.
Less than two power outages per year is unrealistic? Where do you live? o.o I've only had one power outage in my life ever since I moved out of my parents' place more than ten years ago...
(My microwave, BTW, is a sturdy old model that doesn't have fancy things like digital timers, a clock and so on. All it does is heat food, and it's been doing that without any failures for more than 20 years. You just don't get that kind of solid engineering anymore today. ;))
IANAL, but trade dress != trademark. They're related concepts that are quite similar, but they're not the same. (Just a technicality, I know, but still.)
In Soviet FBI, insider attacks YOU!
You may have been joking, but that idea sure makes sense, although you'd have to take into account that the military in general is the symptom, not the underlying cause, so you have to treat the cause first - otherwise, the symptoms will just reappear...
What would your proposal be for a better name, then? One that doesn't confuse the average Joe even though it's still concise...
I'm sure Dell is listening.
Cameras recording private and public spaces are NOT completely different, and the notion that just because someone is in (or acting in) public he has no right to privacy is fallacious as well.
Consider this extreme example: upon leaving your house in the morning, you're greeted by your personal police officer, who will follow you around all day, watch you, film everything you do and record everything you say and write down all the people you interact with and so on. He won't enter any private premises you enter, but he will wait outside until you come back out, and he will always be around when you're in public. And this happens not just once, it happens each day, every day, for the rest of your life; and you neither know what the data is being used for, how long it'll be stored etc., nor do you have a right to access it.
Would you like that?
Probably not. But using your above argument, I could say that it's only your public behaviour - in public - that is being recorded. Why would you be against that? The answer, of course, is that the implied statement that whenever you're in public you have no right to privacy anymore is, simply put, false.
Oh, FIRING one is probably easy... it's doing it in a way that allows you to do it again in the future that's difficult.
Calculating all the digits is neither necessary nor would it be helpful; here's a short proof of pi's irrationality, though.
As long as they only use data from court documents etc. that are publicly available, anyway, I honestly don't see the problem. It's not as if they're making available secret data, after all...
34 out of 332? That's an *abysmal* response rate and pretty much means that the study is entirely worthless, no matter what the conclusions are or who actually answered.
Aron Pálmi Ágústsson is also still in prison, although he will be released in August - at the age of 23, after having spent ten years in a Texan prison for playing doctor with another kid when he was 13. And then they call it a "justice" system...
The proper solution to the "12 year-old and 13 year-old experiment with each other" problem, I think, is to recognise that children (and at 12 or 13 years, they ARE children - old children, but still children!) cannot be held responsible for laws they break the same way that adults do, simply because they lack the ability to understand them properly and reflect on their actions and whether these actions are right or wrong. I'm not even saying that a 12 year-old and a 13 year-old exploring their sexuality together are even doing something wrong, but others would probably disagree, and recognising that as children, they're incapable of committing crimes (mens rea is not given, even when actus reus is), would ensure that they can't be held responsible no matter what some bible-thumping fundamentalist thinks.
As for the rest... why is the age of consent set in stone at 18, anyway? The actual age of consent varies between 13 and 18 in the "western" world (Spain has 13, for example; Iceland, as well as a bunch of other European nations, has 14, and so on), and even in the USA, the actual age of consent seems to vary from 16 to 18 depending on state. Many countries also have special rules for partners with a small age-gap, and/or rules for partners in a relationship based on trust or dependency where coercion is a concern (e.g. teacher/student).
And of course, it's also worth keeping in mind that we're talking about the age below which content can never be given *at all*. Sexual molestation or abuse or rape of someone above the age of consent is still just that, and nobody wants to change that; the only question that should matter when the age of consent is debated is whether it is AT ALL possible for ANYONE to engage in sexual acts consensually, without it AUTOMATICALLY being molestation, abuse or rape.
Personally, I think 14 is a good choice for the age of consent, especially since it fits my definition of who should legally be considered a child (see the first paragraph), too.
(And just for the record, I'm not interested in young people, myself - I actually prefer my partners to be at least 10 or 20 years older than I am.)
Or they'll just move to a different town that doesn't have similar restrictions. This is a classic example of CYA (cover your arse) security; it doesn't make a iota of a difference with regard to any future crimes that may be committed, but when something *does* happen, it allows the politicians involved to say "it's not our fault - we did something about it!". In fact, if it happens in another town, they can even pat themselves on the back and point to the fact that it didn't happen in theirs as evidence for how well their laws and regulations are working.
So, yeah - it's all about covering your own arse and being able to come across as a hardliner so you'll get more votes from the "won't somebody please think of the children" hardliner moos and BNPs. What it is NOT about - and what it actually does not achieve - is actually reducing crime or making anyone genuinely safer.
Wink-wink-nudge-nudge.
The coral cache link isn't working for me at least, but mirrordot seems to have caught it. Just be sure to chop off the first 3635 bytes of HTML prepended to the file.
Outside of the fact that this is an entirely (a priori) baseless statement, why would he even appear "in front of a jury"? Look at this way: suppose a Romanian company sues you for something you post about in your blog. Would you travel to Romania then to appear in front of a Romanian court? Of course not, so why should he do the same thing when he's sued in the USA?
Copyright law isn't the same all over the world. Sure, this kind of argument probably wouldn't float in the USA, but can you really say whether there's any merit to it in India?
Indeed - both Yahoo and hotmail are artificially inflating their numbers. Yahoo requires you to have an account if you want to use just about anything on Yahoo (like Yahoo Groups, for example), and while a hotmail account isn't strictly required to use msn (the IM service), 99% of the people I know use one, anyway - M$ just tries you to steer away from signing up with a third-party email address in any way it can (or at least it did when *I* signed up).
So, yeah, it's quantity vs. quality. Maybe GMail *still* is a distant third, but I think the numbers for the other two services are overinflated and useless.
Let's hear your Ukrainian, then! Or any foreign language, for that matter. Come on, show us what you can do!
Oh, you don't speak any languages besides English? How unexpected.
And...? I'm not actually sure what the point of this story is. Teens do stupid things? Wow, news at 11! As long as it was just a *comparatively* minor bill of 1100 USD and as long as there were no consequences besides the financial ones, it's no big deal - at least not for anyone other than the girl's parents.
Of course, he's actually putting the cart before the horse - there is no such thing as "intellectual property", and therefore, there is no discrepancy in the treatment of "intellectual property" vs. actual property. The fact that copyrights are not perpetual is precisely WHY they aren't (one form of) "intellectual property", so you cannot argue for perpetual copyright by claiming that they already are.
Funny then how it says "*Congress* shall make no law". If they really intended it to apply to more than what the government (federal or state) does, then why did they write the amendment like that?
Also, the US constitution does not grant a right to free speech; it recognises an EXISTING right to free speech. Big difference.
Indeed. 1500+ USD for a keyboard? My whole computer didn't cost that much.
Hey, this is German we're talking about. "Monosyllabic German" is a contradiction in terms. :)